Thinking about the Future: Encourage Experiments and Prototypes
From Andy Hines and Peter Bishop's book, Thinking About the Future, comes this advice: encourage experiments and prototypes.
There is no single best approach to preparing organizations for the future. Choosing the right approach requires getting a sense of all the options--which in turn can be generated by experiments and prototypes.
Key steps: Ways to encourage experimentation and prototyping are legion. Creativity guru Edward de Bono (1996) recommends first acknowledging that the way things are currently done in the organization is just one way. The current approach may have been the best at the time it was implemented, but circumstances change with time. There is always the opportunity to rethink how things could be done better.
Innovation writer Andrew Hargadon (2003) recommends encouraging staff to work across different areas within and outside the organization. His research indicates that innovation is essentially a synthesis of ideas from different domains, brought together in novel ways. Therefore, encouraging staff to work in cross-sector teams and to visit external groups is one key to sparking new ideas.
Strategy expert Gary Hamel (2003) suggests creating a “marketplace for ideas” within the organization--essentially, bringing the concept of venture capitalism inside. For example, managers could be given the opportunity to spend a small percentage of their budgets each year on any in-house project of interest to them, anywhere in the organization. Often, says Hamel, one of the deterrents to ideas being further developed is lack of funding, so this idea of internal seed capital could give life to innovations that otherwise would have died on the vine.
Benefits: There are two major benefits from encouraging experiments and prototypes. First, if organizations are to evolve successfully into the future, they need to be seeding the next generation of products, services, or business models today. The odds of success are greater if there is a range of experiments from which to choose. As Hamel and Valikangas state (2003:59) , “Most companies would be better off if they made fewer billion-dollar bets and a whole lot more $10,000 or $20,000 bets--some of which will, in time, justify more substantial commitments. They should steer clear of grand, imperial strategies and devote themselves instead to launching a swarm of low-risk experiments…”
Second, de Bono (1996) argues that the usual Western approach to problem-solving or improvement is to attack and criticize, then look for an alternative. This analytical approach does not always lead to creative or fruitful solutions. The alternative--often non-Western--perspective, he says, is to acknowledge what already exists, then look for and develop alternatives. Then, compare the alternatives and their results with what exists. This creative and free-flowing activity allows for a more diverse range of options, leading to a wider variety of potential solutions. As Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
For example: Hamel and Valikangas (2003) describe the case of Whirlpool. Between 1999 and 2003 the company involved 10,000 of its employees in a range of workshops and training sessions to search for breakthrough ideas. The result was 7,000 ideas, which led to 300 small-scale experiments. The company went on to manage this innovation process through a set of measures that enable senior executives to track how many new ideas are being generated, where they are in terms of development, and their potential financial impact.
Check back soon for another section from the book on scanning.
Who should buy the book? Thinking about the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight, co-edited by Social Technologies’ Director of Consulting Andy Hines and University of Houston Futures Professor Peter Bishop, is an essential reference guide for executives, educators and analysts. With input from 36 senior foresight professionals, the 231-page book is a powerful tool that analyzes the six phases of strategic foresight: framing, scanning, forecasting, visioning, planning, and acting. Order your copy.
Hope Katz Gibbs
in Publications, Futurism
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